Lucy Bull’s paintings are visceral works that appeal directly to the senses. Synesthetic fields of shape and color, the paintings are described in sonic, tactile, or even emotional terms that evade rational logic and are unique to each viewer. As their formal attributes function as visual bait, the eye is drawn into the atmospheric spaces of their compositions before encountering a seemingly limitless number of associative openings. Worlds take shape across their varied surfaces and just as quickly fall away again; similarly, just when the act of looking generates optical overload or disruptive dissonance, Bull’s accumulations of marks reveal discernible traces of planning and hard-fought negotiations with her materials, leading the viewer back toward the concrete realities of pigment, medium, and surface. As she engages in these open-ended painterly experiments, Bull makes room for both precision and abandon, inviting viewers to participate in ever-unfinished processes of creation that she choreographs but never fully controls.

Lucy Bull (b. 1990, New York) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); High Art (Arles, 2020; Paris, 2019); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2019); Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2019); and RMS Queen Mary, Mother Culture, Long Beach, California (2017). Recent group exhibitions include Life Still, CLEARING, New York (2020); I Want to Eat the Sunset. We’re Talking About the Cosmos, Even. And Love, I Guess, Almine Rech, New York (2020); and El oro de los tigres, Air de Paris, Romainville, France (2020). Her work is in the permanent collections of MAMCO Geneva and the ICA Miami. Bull lives and works in Los Angeles.